Legendary Hoplite

Tl;dr: This is a mixed review mainly complaining about how the grinding ruins the promising parts of the game. Also, the game is not in the categories it claims to be, but you can enjoy it with the right expectations considering its core gameplay loop.

I liked the core idea of the game and how it plays alongside its theme, but not certain design choices. After I realized the previous problems about the game that were present in the prologue versions persisted in the full release, the game fell below my expectations.

First of all, I should mention that this game is neither a role-playing nor a roguelite game. The game also doesn't have proper adventure elements. Although the game does not belong to these genres, these are the first tags you observe on the store page of the game, which are misleading. Legendary Hoplite is an action strategy game that feels close to a hack and slash, and it does not have proper role-playing or adventure elements, but it calls itself an action RPG that meets tower defense, which is wrong.

The best thing about the game I think is the different equipment skills. There is a great variety of them, and it is fun to mix your equipment skills and troops in the correct way to overcome levels. Although the equipment and skill system in the game feel great, they require a great deal of grinding.

Talking about grinding, oh boy... Depending on items' rarities and types, weapons have different basic stats, additional enhancements, and active abilities. When you create a build, it gets outdated fast since the higher an item's level is, the higher its basic stats are. This results in your build getting useless in no time, and you are left out with a bunch of new high-stat but no-synergy equipment. When you decide to create a build or update your current one via equipment with better overall stats, it requires a great deal of grinding to get them. I believe the game would be so much better if it included active abilities in a loadout system like troops' rather than making the game a grind fest.

There are a number of troops in the game that have unique upgrade paths. Although their upgrade paths do not change their core behavior, it is great to be able to customize your troop layout and upgrade distribution to overcome levels. Again, the terrible grind system makes this aspect of the game feel not right too. To upgrade your troops, you need coins rather than upgrade points, and the overall grinding nature of the game ruins this system in my opinion.

When it comes to the pacing of the game, it just feels wrong. Until the second boss encounter in the game, you basically are invincible, and you can't fail even if you call all the waves early. The game is too easy during the few initial levels, and just after the second boss, the game has a difficulty spike that is pretty hard to overcome and it doesn't feel right. In the prior levels, there were sections where I waited with an empty screen for over 10 seconds since there were no enemies due to the game being too easy, and it also does not allow you to call the next wave as early as you would expect. To note, there also is a setting in the game that gives you infinite lives or just one life. This does not affect the difficulty scaling in a meaningful way, especially for at least average players.

Graphics and animations in the game were good although there were certain inconsistencies regarding how things looked, and I especially liked the cutscenes. When it comes to sound design, I found the quality of the audio assets and their implementation in the game weak. I believe it would be better if certain indicators that are related to the player's and troops' actions were not lost in chaos, and I think it can be fixed with proper mixing. The audio does not affect the gameplay at all though, so these issues may not be a problem for you.

Finally, I must say that I love playing games with a gamepad, but Legendary Hoplite had one of the most problematic gamepad experiences I ever had in a game. The game favors playing with a keyboard for sure, so if you insist on playing any game with a gamepad, Legendary Hoplite might give you some trouble as well.

In short, the game feels like it had so much potential but lost almost all of it due to a nonsensible grind system. I hated every bit of the grinding in the game, and I normally like grinding in lots of other games. If you can endure the level of grinding in this game, I think you would enjoy it.

This game doesnt deserve mixed reviews. It is well made, thought out and I encountered no bugs beating the game.

I think it all comes down to "this is impossibly difficult", which it isnt. It's no idle "the game beats itself and I can feel good about myself" games. If you struggle at a stage, switch out your troops, your equipment and mix up your strategy and you're usually good to go.
I feel like I died around a dozen times, which honestly isn't much for a game of that lenght.

Another criticism I read in the comments is how grindy this game is. So yeah, if the above doesnt help you, you can go grind equipment and gold (to upgrade your troops) and I went on one grind in my playthrough, which looking back felt optional.

People complain about impossible bosses - the game tells you in the cut scenes how to beat the bosses, that have special mechanics. But you can figure it out yourself too. I know cuz I figured it out myself for the Medusa and Hydra.

Anyway, good game.

Boy the other reviewers weren't kidding. The difficulty ramps up suddenly and viciously a third of the way into the first act, and stays arbitrarily high. The only tool you really have to remedy this is to drop the game's difficulty slider down onto tiny baby mode, as there's no consequences for doing this and as you can't grind for progression---you get advancement points from clearing stages and from clearing challenge quests, nothing else.

Equipment is also on random drop, and you have to go several levels at a time ignoring it until it gives you the effects you need for your build. Your can sell your surplus for money, but the amount is insultingly small, as is the money awarded randomly by enemy kills during stages. You need money to customize your buildings, and in general the game seems to expect you to have way more than you do at any given time.

However, if you look past this, you get a pretty paper-flat plot and an art style that looks great, but feels like it's maybe trying to ride on Hades' coattails.

So, why I am I still recommending it? If you get past all of these other things, there's a fun idea in here. Turret shooter / moba / td / rpg, all in one package. The enemy types are interesting, and the variety of upgrade paths and build styles is interesting---although the game doesn't let you experiment too much here, you need Leadership and you need Witches, and everything else is circumstantial.

The game also has some absolutely daunting tool tips that it throws at you, including a reminder to fully build up one column at a time before moving on to the next. This sounds insane to anyone who's played anything else in the genre, but no, the game means it. Unless you have hoplites in the front and healers in the back and a bard to buff their action speeds, that column is going to fold the second a train of enemies hits it, and then you're down all the points you invested in it and need to reset the stage.

OR.

Or you could switch to tiny baby easy mode, steamroll through stages, collect all the upgrades you need, and then play it on normal.

It really feels like a roguelike meta progression system is missing, or a way to grind, or a way to upgrade existing equipment instead of relying on the dice, or *something* to compensate for the game's wild difficulty spike.

Pre-spike, it's a lot of fun, and once you start playing the one way the game will allow you to play post-spike it's fine too, but I can see a lot of people bouncing off this one and you're not wrong if you do.

Edit: So, a weird quirk of the design is that there's these pauses between waves that you can't fast forward through. In fact, you can call waves early, but ONLY at a specific time---basically whenever the current wave was done. So there's awkward stretches of levels where there's nothing on the board and you're just waiting. They're more common early on during the normal difficulty levels, but they persist into the mid game. It's strange to see a td have this problem, since "let the player fast forward" is tech that's almost as old as the genre, but I think they built the pauses here to ensure you could regenerate stamina at specific times and, uh, not every player is going to need to regen stamina at the exact same time during levels.

2nd Edit: The translation is a little rough in places, and unfortunately those places are pretty impactful. It's not always super clear what a challenge mission is asking me to do, or what an ability does, etc. And this wouldn't be a problem, but sometimes it interferes with collecting (scarce, necessary) stat points.

3rd Edit: Also can we take a minute to talk about how the challenge criteria are often obnoxious? "Win without using any legendary equipment," "win with less than 15 stat points allocated," "win without using x/y/z powers". Stuff that requires you to shuffle around your build and/or hope for drops. "Don't let any enemies leak," is normal, reasonable, and it's a challenge criteria only occasionally here. A lot of the other criteria are these weird build contortions.

4th Edit: Here's a boss that requires you to jankily active parry an awkward hitbox several times in a row. Why yes, this is a tower defense.

5th Edit: Yeah. Switching to a thumbs down. The art and the music are nice, but ultimately the scaling building costs force you to invest in leadership, which means you need to do the tedious challenge quests. The design wants you to rush full upgrades in one building type before moving on to the next (a tooltip tells you this!) but the costs are so wildly inflated that you have to grind tiny amounts of gold to attempt this, and even if you succeed if you level the thing over what your leadership can manage you've messed up. And this would all be minor if your equipment wasn't random drop, meaning it's a coin toss whether you have anything useable at your current level, or you're stuck with viable gear from 10+ levels back. Which wouldn't even be a problem if grinding was fun, but the bizarre intermittent pauses in waves and the lack of fast forward or an actual button that lets you actually call the wave early, not whatever arbitrary window the designers decided meant early, means it sucks to replay anything in this game. It sucks worse than it sucks to play a Legendary Hoplite stage for the first time. I hate to be like "just design the game good, and then it won't be bad" but Legendary Hoplite walks shins-first into some of the weirdest stumbling blocks imaginable. There's good ideas in here, but they're engulfed in baffling design.